


Million Dollar Man

by Triddlegrl



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Angst, Eternal Sunshine!Au, M/M, Mental Breakdown
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 08:55:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/672579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Triddlegrl/pseuds/Triddlegrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two strangers meet on a train... only they aren't strangers. Once upon a time a boy named Kurt met a boy named Blaine and they saved each other from bullies on the playground. They grew up and fell in love (maybe not in that order) and they promised each other forever. They've forgotten those promises, and each other. Or maybe not. This is a love story backward.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Million Dollar Man

**Author's Note:**

> I owe this fic to my love of Eternal Sunshine, as well as to this magnificent Steve/Tony video on my youtube playlist.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xJQjj7dwIc  
> GO WATCH IT. Even if you don't ship the pairing it is the most beautiful Eternal Sunshine fusion I've ever seen, and truly some inspiring editing. I was so moved by it that I began looking for ESOSM!Au fics for my favorite pairings and began musing this one for Klaine. This fic is directly inspired by Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, though not a crossover.

 

_How happy is the blameless vestal's lot_   
_The world forgetting, by the world forgot_   
_Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind_   
_Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned. -Alexander Pope_

Blaine considers himself to be pretty average for a man in his late thirties. He has a typically high pressured job that he’s sure he once enjoyed, a sprawling group of acquaintances, and a few tried and true friends who have seen him through every awkward phase and every hardship. And most days, like most people, he convinces himself that the ache of dissatisfaction that plagues him is normal.

When he can’t, he takes the train all the way out to Bushwick. He can’t explain what draws him there, but he remembers the first trip like a first kiss. He’d left work that day with the weight of the world on his chest, an undefinable heaviness dragging his steps, and the beginnings of a sob tightening his throat. He’d gotten on the first train to anywhere and let the steady motion of it rock him into numbness, willing to go anywhere if it meant finding answers. He often tries to remember what his questions were and he always comes up empty. He’d exited the station a hollow man that day and wandered the streets without aim. It was only when the chattering of his own teeth had broken through his daze that he’d realized how blue his fingers had become, and that the numbness in his limbs was no longer comforting.  

A woman carrying a brown bag of groceries had passed him, turning just in front to walk up the steps of the nearest apartment building, and she’d smiled at him like a neighbor. She’d held the door after herself, welcoming him into warmth and the soft glow of artificial light and he’d followed the promise of her smile inside. He’d ducked inside that apartment building because it was close, because the woman had mistaken him as a resident, but he’d stayed because his feet had seemed to find roots.

The building in Bushwick had felt like home and he had found sanctuary on a sparse rooftop, an easy peace of mind he could find nowhere else.

*****

Kurt considers himself to be lucky. If not quite so lucky in love, at least lucky enough to have a promising career. If he’s lonely he consoles himself with his creativity, reminding himself that fame and loneliness often come hand in hand, as does being different. He paid for his differences for most of his youth, and he is glad to no longer be that boy. He is not afraid and nor does he need a gaggle of friendships to validate him, though he is happy for the few he has managed to make and maintain over the years.

If he is wistful at odd moments he blames it on being an artist, connecting too deeply with a lyric, remembering a quote from a movie or a play that must have touched him in his anxious youth. He accepts the tears when they come and does not often try to find a reason for them. His friends never ask. They are as silent as graves with the sad eyes of mourners.

Sometimes all it takes is a song. Something frivolous and quick caught tinkling from the radio of a passing car or pouring out a shop window as he walks past.

_You want a revelation, Some kind of resolution, You want a revelation._

The tears will swell unbidden and his footsteps will slow as he listens to the insistent drumming of the notes, and shivers beneath the violent daylight. Sometimes he’ll close his eyes just to be rid of the harsh brilliance of it, trading sunlight for the comforting blanket of darkness as he fights to remember lyrics he never knew to begin with.

He tries to remember his adolescence but comes up with a confusing soup of memories that are drenched in the feeling of crippling isolation and a miserable ache that has no explanation. He knows his childhood was broken, and the familiar relief of only having pieces of it left to grasp, is as about as familiar to him as his frustration with it. He can’t explain his own contradictions, and given a moment or two he always opens his eyes and glances around with embarrassment.

Kurt considers himself lucky most days, but sometimes all it takes is a song. He collects music like most people because it tastes so strongly of nostalgia.

****

Blaine wants love as much as the next person. He’s human and always looking for connection, but he’s also adult, and that seems synonymous with cynical and guarded with every year that passes with failed attempts at romance and lasting relationships strewn behind him.

But despite his bouts of melancholy and the strange surges of restlessness that sometimes assail him he is an optimist, eyes always open and smile at the ready. When he meets a beautiful stranger on the train it’s a pleasure to grin and strike up a conversation. He gets his attention by bopping along to the tinny sounds of Lana Del Rey he can hear coming from his headphones. The stranger blushes, but grins in return as he lowers the volume and apologizes for being such a teenager.

His name is Kurt and he woke up late, he usually takes the earlier train. He says music puts him back together, and then he blushes because they both know he shouldn’t have said it to a virtual stranger. Blaine tells him that he sings to remember who he is, because he doesn’t want them to be strangers.

Kurt is incredibly distracting, and though Blaine could list twenty things about the way he looks that have him fascinated within the first thirty seconds, he knows without having to dig that there is so much more to Kurt than that.

He thinks it’s special, the stuff of poems and prose, the way he knows that the turn of Kurt’s smile could shape the corners of his world. It’s the stuff of adolescence the way his heart pounds giddy in his chest, and he revels in the dreamy aspect of the moment, sixteen again in his spirit, and more idealistic than he can even remember being back then.

As Kurt shares happily with him the contents of his playlist, he tries desperately to recall if he’d ever felt like this about a boy, about anyone really in the years sense then, but it’s a useless endeavor. Too much time has clouded his history, his youth is fragmented and lost in scattered puzzle pieces… but a song comes to him. Words he must have heard on the radio, must have danced to, must have loved if they are still etched into the cracks of his adult brain.

_I finally found you, my missing puzzle piece._

****

Kurt’s father keeps secrets. He’s not the only one, but if not for him Kurt might never have suspected that there was anything the others would hide from him. Burt always worries about him, the way a father should, whether he’s happy and if he has everything he needs.

There is a sadness in his eyes when they are together and a shadow over his words whenever they speak, and like so much of Kurt’s past it has no explanation. Kurt knows Burt worries that each year that passes with relationships that fizzle and holidays spent alone, means that Kurt will miss out on the things that typically bring people the most satisfaction. Though he insists he is content without those things he doesn’t like making Burt worry, and doesn’t like the lingering fear in the back of his mind that he is somehow defective.

He considers himself lucky, but the world feels off kilter. There is always a shadow hanging over him, a grey that he cannot touch but can feel pressing against his skin. It’s there in the empty spaces of his apartment, in the aborted speech of his friends, in the regret in his father’s eyes. There is something missing and it has no explanation. He doesn’t think about it most days, but sometimes all it takes is a song.

It’s one of those off days. He wakes up from a dream he can’t remember, an edginess to his mood that he can’t be rid of. He hurries to ready for work and rushes to the next train. He sticks his ear buds in and pumps his music like he’s fourteen again, careless of the people that surround him. He gets lost in the music, soaks in the feeling of nostalgia the words always bring, and tries not to cry over the fact that none of it is real. He doesn’t remember this song or anything else from when he was fourteen.

_  
You're screwed up and brilliant, Look like a million dollar man, So why is my heart broke…_

He’ll say after that that he was pulled to open his eyes by fate, that he was always meant to find the smile that greets him from across the aisle.


End file.
